Our view: Expanded archives necessary

We simply have no choice but to expand the Rutherford County Archives building before it runs out of storage space in the next two years. Nonetheless, this may be a good time for officials to re-evaluate the state’s record-keeping requirements.

Changes in state regulations likely wouldn’t help with the county’s current situation. We need storage space to preserve legal documents, and we can expect to pay $300,000 to $400,000 for it.

That is the estimated cost to add 3,000 square feet to the current archives building on Rice Street in Murfreesboro. County archivist John Lodl said he expects that is the amount of space needed to serve the county for the next 20 years.

The current $1.3 million facility, built in 2006, was designed with the intention of adding on to it as needs arise.

The county’s rapid growth has created a need, and state law requires that certain records be kept on paper, including marriage licenses and wills. Some documents on file go back to 1804, Lodl said, and these hard copies take up space.

Also with a new county judicial building scheduled to open in 2018 on Lytle Street, officials don’t want to take up needed courtroom and office space there to store court records.

Rutherford County Mayor Ernest Burgess recently said the goal is to have space available at the archives building to accept older court records currently stored at the existing Judicial Building.

We appreciate efforts by the county employees to scan some records electronically. That will mean easier access to a wider audience of researchers if posted online. Already, digital records are available that are surely a genealogist’s dream and include Rutherford County’s early births, deaths and marriages.

That leads us to question whether record-keeping requirements dictated by state law need a good, hard look. Should more pieces of paper be turned into digital records that can be printed if hard copies are needed?

Of course, we do risk the chance of hackers damaging digital records, but paper files are not a perfect solution either. They require specific and expensive safeguards to keep pages from disintegrating, not to mention the damage that could be caused by fire or water. Microfilm also can be damaged by temperature changes and high humidity.

We would never suggest that important historic documents be shredded. We do, however, feel that at some point, paper records will be too cumbersome to continue to maintain en masse.

Lucky for Rutherford County we have a fine archivist in John Lodl to steer us into the future while maintaining respect for the past.

News director Sandee Suitt wrote this editorial on behalf of The Daily News Journal Editorial Council. Email her at suitt@dnj.com or call 615-278-5160. The Editorial Council meets at noon Tuesdays in The DNJ conference room on the fourth floor of the SunTrust Building, 201 E. Main St., Murfreesboro. The meetings are open to the public.